Movie Review: SHORTS

Cast: Huma Qureshi, Satya Anand, Aditya Kumar, Richa Chadha, Arjun Srivastava,
Murari Kumar, Preeti Singh, Shankar
Debnath, Nawazuddin Siddiqui, Aditi
Khanna, Vineet Singh, Ratnabali
Bhattacharjee

Directors: Shlok Sharma, Siddharth Gupt, Anirban Roy, Rohit Pandey, Neeraj
Ghayman

Star Report Rating: *** 1/2

Shorts is exactly that. Five short films,
wildly different in choice of story,
technique, and tone. But these films,
produced by Anurag Kashyap and Guneet
Monga, have one thing in common: they
are helmed and performed by fresh new voices and faces. If these filmmakers go
on to make features (and I know at least
one of them has completed his first),
then we are in for some good times.

Sujata has Huma Qureshi play a victim of
long abuse at the hands of a cousin. The
abuse began when she and he (Kumar)
were much younger, and Sharma shows
with economy that she has never really
been able to get away from him. It starts slow and then builds up, the older
version of the cousin played by Anand,
into a crescendo. The end is satisfying
and disturbing, and the performances are
good.

Epilogue has three characters — one
woman, two men -- occupying different
planes. If that sounds a little abstruse, it
is meant to. It reminded me a little of
the kind of psychedelic European films
that used to be made: here are the visuals, and there's your interpretation.
This one is a bit of a stretch though Richa
Chadha stands out, inviting your gaze.

Audacity takes you into a home which
has a rebellious young daughter and a
father who sits and reads a newspaper,
and a mother who is resentful, and
cooks. It is a dysfunctional family, and it
ends on a note you can see ahead. But the actors are all such a fit,
especially the
young Preeti Singh.

Nawazuddin lights up the dystopian
universe of Mehfuz, a place where
people are dying continuously of
mysterious causes, and ending up in
pyres, and graves. Nawaz's face,
smeared with dust and dirt and pain, is, as ever, a stayer.

And Shor is about a man uprooted from
his native UP trying to find his feet in
Mumbai, and struggling for a rhythm
with his wife, who has to leave the
home in order to work and feed her
family — an ever grumbling mother-in- law, jobless husband, and little boy. Both
Vineet Singh and Ratnabali
Bhattacharjee are excellent, and the
direction is assured.

They are all interesting in their ways,
but for me the ones that worked the
most were Sujata and Shor: using the
same old human conditions and feelings
and re-casting them anew makes for the
best stories.